At Control Group, O'Donnell has helped lead the company through a recession from a three-person start-up to a staff 70 strong.

He knows how to develop a noteworthy firm: The Wall Street Journal name-checked Control Group in its coverage of barcode technology developed for Fashion Week and Inc. talked to the company about implementing cloud computing.

And now he's finding time to pursue what he calls his "passion project." By leveraging his expertise and those Control Group connections, he says Fav&Co is beginning to take off. But can he recreate his day job's success?

"We're used to making beautiful products for our clients," O'Donnell says. "We understand a lot of the background about great SEO and about great user experiences, and [we're using it] to do something we want to do for a change."

It all started about a year ago, when O'Donnell and some friends — a self-described circle of "uber-geeks" — searched for a place online where they could share the latest products they were into related to their individual interests (like photography or the outdoors). It had to be something more personal than Amazon reviews, and more lifestyle-centric than Yelp. They couldn't find it anywhere.

"It's kind of an obvious thing," he says. "If you want to know what kind of camera to buy, you're going to ask your photographer friend. It's a very natural thing."

So the tech-savvy friends decided to create an online place for that themselves.

"We were developing a lot of rich user experiences for clients and we thought it'd be really fun to make a platform to share our own discoveries with each other," O'Donnell said. "We wanted something that people could share these great discoveries that they've had with their friends and families and also discover what else people like to do."

Now, Fav&Co is online, tapping into users' Facebook networks to connect them with friends and family who are sharing their lesser-known passions on the site, where users can subscribe to specific lifestyles (like "Jet Setter" or "Perfect Gentleman") to see the latest products others find that match the look. Hand-crafted products made by small businesses have been especially popular among users to review and share, O'Donnell says.

Users log in to write out their thoughts and post photographs of products to the site's magazine-esque interface, then they share them via Facebook or Twitter. O'Donnell declined to give hard numbers, but said he's "just really happy" with the site's traction so far.

As with any ambitious new project, this one has required a huge investment of time and brainpower. O'Donnell is up before the sun rises splitting his time strategizing for Fav&Co and his Control Group clients.

"Fortunately, we're doing stuff we love so no one's forcing us to do any of this," O'Donnell says. "If enough people are interested in it and there's a lot of activity around it, it becomes an important thing that you want to drive forward, you want to bring out into the world, and create or give a life of its own."

If Fav&Co expands the way he hopes it will, O'Donnell might wind up overextended. It's debuting a wish list feature this week to add an extra boost to user activity. The project is currently funded internally by private investment, but if it expands its reach, he hints that there might be room for brands to get involved.

"We're going to keep growing, we're going to focus on our users and [roll] out features reacting to comments or requests for new features," he says. "We work closely with a few big partners [at Control Group] — Apple and Amazon — and [we will be] looking to see how, from a different angle, we can incorporate those relationships and continue to grow the community."

But that'll happen later. For now, it's about O'Donnell refining Fav&Co and integrating his personal "passion project" into the patchwork social media world.

"You're spending so much time working on clients' projects and a lot of ideas and thoughts come up. It's great to have a creative outlet," he says. "The barrier to entry to building a product has dropped significantly. It doesn't make sense not to have a hand at it."

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